Content Marketing: 3 Overlooked Content Sources

Every marketing strategist, from SMB to enterprise and B2C to B2B, has one thing in common: content.

Content lives at the core of all marketing campaigns and is the glue that connects initiatives at every level of the marketing mix.

Content comes in many forms: white papers, articles, blog posts, infographics, webinars, videos, contents, polls, interviews, images, etc.

The importance of content cannot be overstated and neither can the struggle that marketers have producing it.

Let’s look at three commonly overlooked content sources and tactical ways to squeeze more content out of them.

Events and Speaking Engagements

Most companies have an internal champion that speaks at industry tradeshows, webinars, and the like. Each of these engagements can easily fuel multiple content assets. Here are a few examples of how:

• The Speaking Engagement: First, make it a process to have all speaking engagements recorded. These videos can be hosted on your site to showcase brand visibility and subject matter expertise.
• Transcription: Transcribe the speaking engagement using a service like GMR Transcription. Edit the written document and use it as text that can be indexed and read. There’s a good chance your audience may prefer reading the content vs. watching and listening to it.
• Blog Post: Write a blog post that summarizes the main talking points of the speaking engagement and even the show where the engagement took place.
• Article: Write an article that dives into more details from the speaking engagement’s main points. Perhaps add more color to the main talking points by doing some research to provide additional resources and validation. You can also have the speaker provide additional details in the article that might not have been communicated at the event.

Host and Record Brainstorming Session

This is something that few marketers do, yet it works incredibly well. Best of all, it’s cheap, fast, and fairly easy to accomplish. Get a small group of experts together on a topic of importance to your company and simply get a conversation going. Ask open-ended questions around typical customer challenges. Let’s use Web analytics as an example:

• What is the best way to get lead tracking set up in analytics?
• What is the best solution to overcoming “not provided” challenges?
• What are the three most common analytics mistakes that you come across?
• How do you solve each of these mistakes?

Most important is to make sure you record the conversation! Once you have a recording in place, you can go back to the recording to get details on the answers and responses. To put this in perspective, the average conversation has 196 words per minute or 11,670 words in an hour. If an average blog post or article is 1,000 words, you can see how an hour-long brainstorming session can create numerous content assets.

Content Repurposing

Many of you are probably aware of the idea that big content assets can be cut up into smaller ones. The traditional example of this involves cutting up a white paper into a series of articles or blog posts. Take a look at this presentation for an example of how this is done.

The opposite of this concept can be effective as well, where smaller assets are repurposed and packaged as a larger one.

For example, you could compile 20 blog posts on a particular topic and turn that into a PDF that is used as a gated asset – from the previous analytics reference, it might be “20 Great Web Analytics Blog Posts.”

You can also take a select number of these blog posts that are closely related and weave them together into one unified white paper. If you take the time to categorize and index all of your content assets, it can make this process much easier.

Special SEO note: These examples should primarily be used for gated purposes to avoid duplicate content penalties from search engines. Having said that, this approach is a legitimate way to maximize existing investments in content assets by using them across other channels like marketing automation, PPC, and video.

Summary

Creating great content is a big challenge, and companies will never get away from the need for publishing regular, fresh, and compelling content. With that said, marketers often overlook existing assets that can be used as a stopgap during content dry spells associated with things like budget cycles, timelines for new content, and the like.